Re: OT: Questions on Bikini Tests Able & Charlie

From: Henry Spencer (henry_at_spsystems.net)
Date: 01/28/05 

Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 04:43:30 GMT

In article <41fb948c.6460135@supernews.seanet.com>,
Derek Lyons <fairwater@gmail.com> wrote:
>projectile was much more highly enriched, and the rings were re-used
>metal from early criticality testing ('tickling the dragon'). Little
>Boy was something of an afterthought... The vast bulk of the effort
>at Los Alamos went into Fat Man.

Mind you, in large part that's because the implosion bomb was much harder
to develop -- not least because there was no equivalent of "tickling the
dragon", no way to run a small-scale test that could be extrapolated
straightforwardly to the behavior of the full bomb. Which is why the
first Fat Man was expended in a test, while the first Little Boy was
dropped in combat with reasonable confidence that it would work.

(Indeed, one thing that's been a headache ever since is the question of
just what Little Boy's yield was. Not only was there no full-scale test
beforehand, but the gun bomb used fission fuel so inefficiently that the
Little Boy design saw little use afterward and none was *ever* tested.
The yield matters because so much of our data on radiation effects, used
for setting occupational-exposure standards among other things, is from
Hiroshima; a revised yield estimate a decade or so ago caused a chain
reaction :-) including questioning of some existing exposure standards.) 

-- 
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend."    |   Henry Spencer
                                -- George Herbert       | henry@spsystems.net

Relevant Pages

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